I have been a global "reputation strategist" -- working at the highest levels to help create, enhance and save reputations for a number of years. My firm, Temin and Company, a boutique management consulting firm of 12 people, is focused on providing world-class marketing and media strategy, crisis and reputation management, thought leadership, and leadership communications (speaker and media) coaching.
Among other clients, I work with 19 CEOs, and often their management teams around the world. Our clients include major corporations and their products, professional services firms, nonprofits, universities, authors, scientists and politicians.
I also speak a lot, and conduct media, presentation skills and crisis management training, to corporations, CEO groups, and association meetings around the world. Also go on TV a lot, often as a spokesperson in times of client crises.
Before starting my firm (a life-long dream), I ran marketing for GE Capital, Schroders, Scudder, Citicorp Investment Bank and Columbia Business School.
I love this work, and truly hope to add serious value to whatever we touch.
It is NEVER boring!
In my spare time (!), I am also First Vice Chair of the Board of Girl Scouts of the USA -- pass the cookies, please -- Chair of the Board of Video Volunteers, an international organization empowering the voices of the poorest of the poor, and on many other boards.
I'm currently writing a book on crisis management. Stay tuned for that one!

School Shooting In Chardon, Ohio: 'A Quaint, Lonely Town'

I grew up only miles from Chardon, Ohio. In those days, the only thing the town was known for was maple syrup. Early every spring, just about this time of the year, my parents and I would go down to Chardon’s Maple Syrup Festival, where you could eat all the pancakes you wanted, blanketed with freshly tapped maple syrup. In between rounds you would eat pickles to clear your palate (pickles? Yes, sounds bad, but they were oddly effective.)

Today, Chardon is known for death. Needless death. And just as the maple syrup used to run freely, so now do our tears for such a monumental waste.

On Facebook, the alleged shooter called Chardon ”a quaint lonely town, (where there) sits a man with a frown (who) longed for only one thing, the world to bow at his feet. He was better than the rest, all those ones he detests, within their castles, so vain,” he wrote. There’s more, I just can’t bear to put it down here.

Oh, another needless shooting, seemingly perpetrated by another lost, delusional, alone kid, whose head was filled with an amalgam of nonsense, gathered from some of the worst aspects of our popular culture.

Yes, I know people are ill, people snap…but how can we as a society have the insight, the compassion and the wisdom to spot these troubled individuals before they strike out? And then do something about it?

As always, some examples of extreme personal heroism shine out, such as the coach, Frank Hall, who chased the boy away and saved countless other lives. But how can we amplify the heroes’ actions, without romanticizing the shooters’ voices?

I do think that every one of us in any way involved with the media — and given the ubiquity of social media, that means pretty much everyone– has a responsibility here. We have a responsibility NOT to pander to the lowest common denominators in our culture. NOT to celebrate meanness, bullying, nasty political debate that destroys the soul. Not to celebrate crime, fantasy over fact, and the acceptability of finding a solution to your pain with a gun.

As the days unfold, I am sure we will find out more about this young man, T.J. Lane, and the elements that factored into his delusions and actions. And I bet we will find out more about the media that fed him. I rue that. But we must pay attention to what those triggers were, and as a society, help to quash them. That is our responsibility in all of this.

I rue that the small town I loved as a child has been forever wounded. I grieve for the young men killed, and for their families. And I pray that we can each figure out a way to raise the level of dialogue in our country to a higher plane; to spot the most vulnerable among us; to care enough to either help or hospitalize them; and to keep this scene from being replayed over and over again across the small towns of America, like Chardon, Ohio.

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